1And so that embassy too was empty and fruitless, except that they were admitted and heard. 2Hanno alone, against the senate, pleaded the cause of the treaty, amid deep silence owing to his authority, not with the assent of his hearers, calling on the senate by the gods, the arbiters and witnesses of treaties, not to stir up a war with Rome along with the war with Saguntum; 3he had warned them, he had foretold, not to send Hamilcar's offspring to the army; 3neither the shade nor the stock of that man were at rest, nor would treaties with Rome ever remain undisturbed as long as anyone of Barcine blood and name survived.
4'A young man burning with desire for kingship and seeing only one road to it, if by sowing war after war he could live girt with arms and legions, you sent to the armies, as if supplying fuel to a fire. 4So you have fed this fire in which you are now burning. 5Your armies are besieging Saguntum, from which the treaty bars them; 5soon Roman legions will besiege Carthage, led by the same gods through whom in the former war they avenged the breaking of the treaty. 6Is it the enemy, or yourselves, or the fortune of each people that you do not know? 6Envoys coming from allies and on behalf of allies your fine general did not admit into his camp; he abolished the law of nations; 6yet these men, driven away from where not even the envoys of enemies are kept off, have come to you; 6they seek redress under the treaty; 6so that the state may be free of guilt, they demand the author of the wrong and the man accused of the crime.
7The more gently they proceed and the more slowly they begin, the more relentlessly, I fear, they will rage once they have begun. 7Set before your eyes the Aegates Islands and Eryx, and all that you suffered on land and sea for twenty-four years. 8Nor was this boy our leader then, but his father Hamilcar himself, a second Mars, as these men would have it. 8But we had not kept away from Tarentum, that is, from Italy, as the treaty required, just as now we are not keeping away from Saguntum. 9So the gods prevailed over men, and on the question disputed in words, which people had broken the treaty, the outcome of the war, like a fair judge, gave victory to the side on which right stood.
10It is against Carthage that Hannibal is now moving up his sheds and towers, Carthage's walls that he is shaking with the ram: the ruins of Saguntum — would that I were a false prophet — will fall on our heads, and the war begun with the Saguntines must be fought with the Romans. 11"Shall we then surrender Hannibal?" 11someone will say. 11I know that my authority in this matter is slight because of my enmity with his father; 11but I both rejoiced that Hamilcar perished, because, if he were alive, we would already have a war with the Romans, and this young man I hate and loathe as the fury and firebrand of this war; 12and I think he should not only be surrendered in atonement for the broken treaty, but, even if no one demanded him, he should be carried off to the farthest shores of sea and land and banished to a place from which neither his name and fame could reach us nor he unsettle the condition of a peaceful state.
13This is my proposal: that envoys be sent at once to Rome to give satisfaction to the senate, and others to tell Hannibal to withdraw his army from Saguntum, and that they surrender Hannibal himself to the Romans in accordance with the treaty; 13I propose a third embassy to restore their property to the Saguntines.'